Letters to the Editor
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Gold-digger
"As women's earnings have increased, men may have begun to compete for high-earning, highly educated women as women have traditionally competed for high-earning men."
Gee, is it finally time to bury that old slur "gold-digger?" Or, at least apply it gender-neutrally?
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I've heard the term used in a gender-neutral fashion before. In any case, how can you be a gold-digger if you're marrying someone in the same educational and economic class? Is there a double secret probation definition of gold-digger that I'm not aware of?
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gold-digger = gender neutral now?
If a guy is pursuing a woman for her paycheck, most likely he is gay.
Straight men don't give a shit.
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People Are Prizes?
Men compete for women? Are women prizes?
A possible explanation for why more people are marrying within their education level is simply that men and women are going to the same schools and getting the same degrees now. I met my wife on the third day of classes for our degree in Computer Science. At the time, she was the lone female in our group of 20 CS majors. A few years later, my wife's brother, also a CS major at the same college, married a chemical engineer -- also from the same school.
One generation back from us and the chemical engineers had to meet women by taking bus trips to liberal arts colleges. These days, you can chat up your lab partner.
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It is a gender neutral term
Gold-digger, that is, though I have to admit, in my life I've seen more gold-digging women than men. I would like to know the parameters of the study - how the data was accumulated, what questions were asked, etc. When I was younger, I had a job writing questions for exactly such studies, and most of them were deliberately skewed to yield specific results (as the companies paying my firm to conduct these studies had a vested, political interest in making a particular fiction seem factual). California is a very leftist state, so it's possible that the researchers at University of California either deliberately or unconsciously skewed the questions to yield the proper, left-friendly results.
I have known many more men willing to marry below their class than women. Physical beauty is a more powerful force (and more valuable currency) for women, after all, and beautiful, lower class women can and do parlay their looks into a jump up in class through marriage.
On top of that, how many young men do you see marrying older women (Demi and Ashton aside)? Not many. It is far more common for a young woman to marry an older (or much older) man, and specifically (oh, let's be honest, for once), for the money, the money, the money.
And another thing, how many women are going to publicly admit to being gold-diggers? Wouldn't that be letting the cat out the bag? Conversely, so few men are successful at digging gold, it's actually a thrill for them to own up to it (i.e., men have big mouths).
I don't buy it.
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Response to Sam
Here's more on how the study was conducted:
"For their study, the researchers examined U.S. Census Bureau and Current Population Survey data from 1940 to 2003 for both married couples and newlyweds."
The full article is found here:
http://www.prb.org/cpipr/demography/Schwartz.pdf
best, Katharine
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<i>Sigh . . . </i>
Why is it seen as a terrible thing when some pretty young thing marries a much older wealthy thing, and not the reverse? You could say that the monied older person is buying looks and the status it represents. Isn't that just as tacky as as marrying money?
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Now, hold on a sec...
If we believe that men *and* women largely marry people of the same educational level (and the evidence seems fairly strong), then doesn't that lead to a little demographic problem in the future if the number of educated women being produced today widely outstrips educated men?
Sorry to regress the subject back to the Tierney column, but this study seems to lend a little credence to his original statement. In part. The other gold digger stuff... no so much.
Put aside for the moment any analysis of "why" somebody marries another. It stands to reason that if men and women are to continue to get married at the rates that they do now, then many women will have to accept a lesser educated man as a mate.
Now, to be sure, the studies do *not* show that women are unwilling to do this in the future if they desire the company of a guy. In fact, there is some anecdotal evidence (from this forum) that many women are more interested in a man's other qualities. But given that the study shows some rigidity in this regard in *today's* demographic statistics, isn't it a cause for concern?
I mean, our species *does* reproduce sexually, right? :-)
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Maybe there's a reason why women have married "up"
Because when you are already at the bottom the only way to go is up? In the past the majority of women haven't had the same opportunities to garner the wealth that men have. Up until the 1970's, women's two main options to gain wealth were via inheritance or marriage.
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No Kidding
<<Up until the 1970's, women's two main options to gain wealth were via inheritance or marriage.>>
The woman who founded Mary Kay Cosmetics, Estee Lauder, Kate Hepburn, Georgia O'Keeffe, and all the millions of other successful entrepreneurial women who made their money prior to 1970 would disagree with you. More lies from the left.
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I know I shouldn't even engage in it...
but brightstar's comments point to the exceptions to the rule (by the very fact that these women are so exceptional that you can literally name the anomalies), not the rule brightstar suggests is true.
If women's wealth was so omnipresent, the need to list namesakes wouldn't exist.
And there's a huge difference between "entrepreneurial" women who made "money" and "wealth."
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There have always been poor men and poor women
and many fewer men than women have been able to escape poverty by marrying money. It's ridiculous that anyone would imply otherwise (even if it was an unintened by product of polical posturing for other reasons)
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Are women prizes?
Some would say having a good woman to walk through life with is indeed a prize.
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I mean, our species *does* reproduce sexually, right? :-)
so I hear, although by the sounds of things I'm not sure for how much longer.
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A highly dubious suggestion
"As women's earnings have increased, men may have begun to compete for high-earning, highly educated women as women have traditionally competed for high-earning men."
Perhaps we have to define "high-earning, highly educated" (HE2). I would wager that the majority of these HE2 women still marry upwards (e.g., female Georgetown business majors marrying male Harvard Law School grads). I think we may be observing the Bell Curve in effect, rather than any sort of gender parity nirvana.
Additionally, gender parity hasn't resulted for HE2 black women. Why are Condelezza Rice, Anita Hill, Patricia Williams, Mae C. Jamison et al single? Could black women be the canaries in the radical feminist mine?